EPILOGUE

Girl Cryptanalyst and All That

The Friedmans in their home library, 1957.

(George C. Marshall Research Foundation)

The government came for their books on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday in 1958. Scattered clouds, cool midwinter sun. William and Elizebeth were inside their home on Capitol Hill and heard a knock on the front door. They opened it and saw at least three men from the government. Behind them, on the street, was a rented truck, as if the men planned to remove something large from the house.

The Friedmans let them inside. One of the men, S. Wesley Reynolds, was the NSA’s director of security. A second man worked for Reynolds, and a third worked for the U.S. attorney general.

The men asked to see the home library. The Friedmans brought them up to the second floor.

Elizebeth was sixty-six now, William sixty-seven. His health was precarious but the men didn’t know that. They said they had orders to remove a list of books and documents that the NSA wished to reclassify according to a Defense Department order of July 8, 1957, Directive 5200.1, which declared that cryptologic documents previously marked “Restricted,” a low level of classification, were now upgraded to “Confidential,” a higher level. To the horror of the Friedmans, the men started to pull things off the shelves. They removed forty-eight items, including an entire personal safe full of William’s documents, several manuals he had written about cryptology, envelopes of his lecture cards and notes, and his own articles from every phase of his career, including Riverbank, forty years ago.

According to a rumor that later spread through the agency, William “went berserk and he was throwing books around and saying, ‘Take this, take that.’ ” The junior NSA employee who went to the house denied this but admitted that both Friedmans appeared “obviously upset by the action being taken.” The NSA’s Reynolds wrote in a memo three days later, “Mr. Friedman voiced no objections to my taking this material, however, it was quite obvious that he felt deeply hurt and that the material was being taken for reasons other than Security. He stated that this material deals with the history of cryptography and should belong to the American people.”

William didn’t understand why information about hand ciphers from the First World War needed to be seized. The ciphers were obsolete. Was it really necessary to seize papers from 1917 and 1918? To raid their home, their sanctuary, their archive of knowledge? He told a friend, “The NSA took away from me everything that some nitwit regarded as being of a classified nature.”

As the men worked, carrying files out to the truck, Elizebeth looked on in silent rage, barely suppressing her tongue. She considered this a violation of their privacy and worried it was bad for William’s health, which had corroded in the thirteen years since the war, darkening with the mood of a city where counterintelligence had become an obsession. Soviet spies had stolen nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project, and the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee went hunting for communist agents. “The mad march of red fascism is a cause for concern in America,” J. Edgar Hoover said to HUAC, promising that the bureau would attack and expose “the diabolic machinations of sinister figures.” Senator Joe McCarthy destroyed people’s careers with no evidence at all.

William’s depression had returned in 1947. At first he complained to a doctor of “psychic giddiness” while walking and playing golf; the condition manifested itself as a tendency to walk to the left. The giddiness was followed by increasingly severe bouts of insomnia. Unable to sleep, on January 23, 1949, he checked himself into the psychiatric ward of the Veterans Administration hospital in Washington, where doctors placed William with a group of deeply psychotic patients. He hated it there. He went home and continued to deteriorate. By January 1950, William was unable to work or solve puzzles, his mind and muscles seeming to move at one-third or one-quarter speed, and suffering from acute despair. He had suicidal thoughts. His son found a rope and a noose at the house. A friend noticed a length of rope in the backseat of William’s car and asked about it. William replied in a joking tone, “I’m looking for a tree to hang myself.”

Desperate for a solution, he sought out a new psychiatrist in March 1950, Dr. Zigmond Lebensohn of George Washington University Hospital, who was an early proponent of electroshock therapy. William agreed to try it. The first course of shocks began on March 31, 1950. The legendary William Friedman was repeatedly electrocuted while awake, possibly without muscle relaxants (they were not widely used at the time), a heavily padded tongue depressor placed in his mouth to prevent him from breaking his jaw by grinding his teeth when the seizure hit. After six courses of shocks, five to fifteen shocks per course, William was sent home on April 11, 1950. Lebensohn observed that the patient “was almost elated when he was discharged and in a characteristically effusive way he kissed the nurses goodbye in a rather avuncular fashion. About a month or so later I saw him and his wife at a Toscanini concert at Constitution Hall.”

William’s illness took a toll on Elizebeth. Hair graying at the temples, perhaps shrunken by an inch (she considered herself five feet and two inches tall now instead of five three), she was 110 pounds and thinner than she’d been since she was a girl. In the polite phrasing of a girlfriend, “Anxiety kept her figure slim.” Retired from government and earning a tiny pension, she spent increasing amounts of time taking care of William. On mornings when he was depressed, she helped him get dressed, drove him to work, walked in with him, placed a pen in his hand, and moved his hand to get the pen moving. She answered his professional mail when he was incapacitated in mental wards. Somehow she still made time for friends and hobbies. She surprised her friends by getting serious about cooking, hosting dinner parties themed around the dishes of India, Mexico, Italy: “I found it an outlet for some hidden creative instincts perhaps.” She looked after her neighbors, once appearing on a sick neighbor’s doorstep with a tray of roast lamb, roast potatoes, gravy, and a yellow rosebud in a vase. She stayed active in the League of Women Voters, researching the legal status of women, international relations, finance, and the urgent need for D.C. statehood. “At the drop of a hat,” she wrote, “I will turn on a spigot labeled SUFFRAGE FOR THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA!”

It often seemed that she had forgotten her own career in codebreaking, that she was content to see her identity and history wash away. This wasn’t the case. In 1951 she received an invitation to speak about her life in codebreaking to a women’s social club in Chicago founded by the first female judge in Illinois. At first Elizebeth urged the group to reconsider: “That part of my life is over, my dear,” she wrote the chairwoman. “You are asking a Has-Been to speak! Your audience will feel cheated, I am sure.” But then she wrote a speech and traveled to Chicago with a suitcase full of lantern slides and at least fifteen mutilated sheets of paper, typed and cut with scissors and taped back together into a new order while she had agonized about what to say, and as soon as Elizebeth introduced herself to the women of the club, the beautiful hopeful postwar women of Chicago, they were hanging on her every word.

Speaking in a pink ballroom at the Blackstone Hotel, where the women had gathered for a dinner-dance, Elizebeth made it clear she wasn’t free to talk about her life during the Second World War, but she was happy to share anything else, to answer any question at all. “Perhaps you may think that the expression ‘code and cipher expert’ describes a person who must live in a world apart,” she said, then explained why this is a misconception. Your child’s report card is a code. A is good, F is bad. It’s not a world apart. It’s just the world.

Elizebeth showed slides of code messages from her famous cases. The I’m Alone. The heroin network of the Ezra twins, “SOLVED BY WOMAN.” The polite Canadian gangsters of the Consolidated Exporters Corporation. The women of Chicago kept her there, asking questions, transfixed, and afterward, Elizebeth received more speaking invitations, traveling to Detroit and giving her talk to a pair of neighborhood groups in private homes; one of the groups asked her questions for two and a half hours. They seemed to think that the story of Elizebeth Smith Friedman was one of the greatest they had ever heard.

Every once in a while, the urge struck Elizebeth to write it all down in one place. She wondered if history would remember her. One winter she and William traveled to England and attended a luncheon at Cambridge with two of their colleagues from the war, including Elizebeth’s cheerful comrade, the astronomer Chubby Stratton. The men at the table got to talking about the war. “As befits a woman in the monastic traditions of Cambridge, I said little,” Elizebeth recalled later, “but my own recollections began to boil up from the cauldron of memories.”

After the luncheon she took out a sheet of lined yellow paper, wrote “FOREWORD” at the top, then described her feelings after V-J Day in 1945, when she “folded my tent to steal away” from the coast guard after six years of “exciting, round-the-clock adventures as we counter-spied into the minds and activities of the agents attempting to spy into those of the United States.” She continued for seven pages, hinting at the dramas and capers of her war without going into specifics, the way an author does at the beginning of a book.

If Elizebeth intended this to be her memoir of the Invisible War, she never wrote the rest. The seven handwritten pages and a typed version of the same are all that exist. She later tucked the typescript into a manila folder marked “foreword to uncompleted work.”

President Truman established the National Security Agency on November 4, 1952, at the peak of McCarthy’s popularity and two and a half years after William’s shock treatments. The NSA fused the signals intelligence units of the army and navy into one organization, including the unit that William founded and nurtured between the wars.

From the start the NSA was the most secret of agencies, basic facts of its existence concealed. William accepted a job there as a counselor and adviser, a role befitting a respected elder. But the agency had less and less use for him as it grew through the 1950s. It hired thousands of young linguists and cryptanalysts who were trained by the textbooks William wrote but who didn’t necessarily listen when he spoke. It broke ground on a new campus in Fort Meade, Maryland, where today at least twenty thousand people work inside two large cubes of eavesdropping-resistant blue-black glass, and invested heavily in computers for breaking codes. William thought computers were “mostly nonsensical and completely nitwit gadgets for daily affairs,” he wrote in a morose letter to the historian Roberta Wohlstetter. And as the NSA grew larger and stronger, it began to use that strength in ways that made William uncomfortable. It scooped up enormous quantities of signals seemingly because it could, towering haystacks of intelligence that would make it difficult to find the needles, and it continued to conceal and classify more and more kinds of documents that William thought should be publicly available. At other times in his life he had argued for greater secrecy, as when he objected to Herbert Yardley’s book in the 1930s; now he muttered darkly to friends about a “secrecy virus” loose in government.

He suffered his first heart attack in April 1955, followed quickly by a second while in the hospital recovering from the first. That fall William retired from the NSA as a full-time employee. The agency gave him a nice ceremony and a consultant contract to keep him around; the director of the NSA at the time, Ralph Canine, admired William. Then a new director replaced Canine, a man with more inflexible views about secrecy and no personal fondness for the great codebreaker, and the agency raided the Friedmans’ home library, and William became depressed again. He wanted to criticize the agency in public, to sound the alarm about the secrecy virus, but feared the NSA would withdraw his security clearance, severing him from his community and many of his own writings.

Whether or not the agency was specifically trying to humiliate him or just rigidly following regulations, William felt persecuted, and in his mentally delicate position, the ordeal was enough to push him to the edge. “Frightening to be alone [with] suicidal thoughts,” he scribbled on a loose sheet of paper. “For fifty years have struggled with this off and on. . . . Repression by secrecy restrictions—fear of punishment chimerical but still there.”

As his disillusionment with the NSA intensified into full-blown paranoia, he reconsidered his long intent to donate his papers to the Library of Congress. He couldn’t bear to hand over the contents of his private library, his proudest possession, to the same government that had sent men to raid it. After some thought he decided instead to bestow his archive to the George C. Marshall Foundation, a private institution at the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia. With Elizebeth’s help he began organizing and indexing his vast trove of treasures in preparation for transfer to the Marshall Library: thousands of books, papers, memos, photographs, prototype board games, and other cryptologic curios. For a brief time the project seemed to revive him. “I now have a great desire to live,” he wrote, “to bring the Marshall Foundation project to a completely satisfactory conclusion.” His body did not cooperate. He suffered more heart attacks. His feet swelled so much he could not climb the stairs at the Folger Shakespeare Library when he went to hear lectures. Elizebeth cared for him as always, taking notes on his condition in a daybook.

MARCH 15, 1969: Bill had fall in night. Confused and loss of memory momentarily.

JULY 20: MAN ON THE MOON. ES & WFF watched on CBS until 3 a.m. when Neil Armstrong and ‘Buzz’ had finished moon walk and return to the module.

SEPTEMBER 24: WFF birthday. Asked for spare ribs!

A few minutes after midnight on November 2, 1969, he had his last heart attack and stopped breathing. Elizebeth called the doctor. William could not be revived. The doctor stayed at the house until after 2 A.M. to comfort her while William’s body was taken away.

Overwhelmed, she picked up the daybook, out of habit.

My beloved died at 12:15.

She started a brief letter to Barbara, who was traveling in Rome.

Dear heart be courageous. Your beloved father died. . . .

Rejoice that he suffered only a very short time.

More than 750 letters and cards of sympathy arrived at the house over the next weeks. Joseph Mauborgne called William “the greatest brain of the century,” a man with an “ever shining place in history.” The novelist Herman Wouk wrote to Elizebeth, “His effect on world history was incalculable, greater than that of kings & captains. Yet what a modest man!” Juanita Morris Moody, a codebreaker who got her start at William’s Arlington Hall in 1943 and went on to supervise the NSA’s Soviet desk, told Elizebeth that her husband was the last of his kind: “Our business now involves many more people and disciplines,” Moody wrote. “It has become more abstract and impersonal. There are no more William Friedmans nor will there ever be.”

Elizebeth received, from the Board of Management of the Cosmos Club, the men-only social club in Washington to which William had belonged, a “Woman’s Privilege Card,” granting access to the club’s facilities for a period of two years.

She designed his tombstone.

WILLIAM F. FRIEDMAN

LIEUTENANT COLONEL

UNITED STATES ARMY

1891 • • • 1969

KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

Elizebeth decided to embed a secret message in the stone, in Bacon’s cipher, in the letters of Bacon’s quote. She specified that certain letters be carved with serifs and the rest without. The serifs were the a-form, sans-serifs the b-form:

KnOwl / edGeI / spOwE

(a- & b-forms shown as lower & upper case)

babaa / aabab / aabab

W / F / F

WFF: her husband’s initials. It was a signature in cipher.

The army buried William with full honors at Arlington National Cemetery, the casket draped with a flag and carried by six black horses along the winding roads of the cemetery to the grave, accompanied by drummers. People from every branch of the military attended the funeral, and so did the antiwar U.S. senator from Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy. Elizebeth and the children were amazed to see him. The kids had worked on his 1968 presidential campaign. It turned out that McCarthy had worked as a codebreaker at Arlington Hall in 1944 under William’s command. The family had had no idea.

After the funeral John Ramsay sent an emotional thank-you letter to McCarthy. “Your presence there seemed to make the idea of a military funeral a little more bearable for all of us. . . . I thought you might like to know that my father was a gentle and peaceful man who detested killing and war, secrecy, spying and all the things you and I hate. But he had a mad love affair with the world of secret writing to which he devoted his life and for which he felt many deep pangs of guilt. In spite of all his honors, he was not a happy man.”

Elizebeth became William’s avenger. Bitter about his treatment over the years by the army and the NSA, and worried that his contributions would be forgotten or erased, she set out to make sure that William received the credit he deserved. She took on this burden at the expense of curating her own legacy, which her grief and her anger now made a secondary concern.

Immediately after his funeral, in the now-empty house, she sat at William’s own desk, the one with the 1918 KNOWLEDGE IS POWER photo under the glass, and worked to complete the annotated bibliography of his papers. The task occupied her for eight to ten hours a day. She mourned her husband while writing crisp descriptions of his articles and books on index cards. She did it out of a sense of duty to William, who would have wanted the project completed, and she also hoped that the collection, once open to the public, would entice a first-rate historian to write a biography of William, a book to cement his reputation.

The Marshall Library paid for a typist to help her one to two days a week and it still took months to finish the 3,002 cards for the 3,002 unique items in William’s collection. Then she arranged to transport all of the material from Washington to the library, three hours south. Men came to the house one day in 1971 and loaded the boxes into trucks, along with William’s desk. She told friends it felt like watching Bill die all over again. She followed the trucks on the highway in her beat-up, ten-year-old Plymouth, engine wheezing all the way to Lexington: “I guess I’m just a little old lady standing in the center of ruin and decay.”

At the Marshall Library she worked six-hour days to manage the details of the transfer, making sure the papers were handled just so, out of love and respect for Bill. The archivists were thrilled to have her guidance (she “was entertained like a queen,” she said) and got her on tape speaking about the donated materials, the Friedmans’ life together, and Elizebeth’s own career. And though she kept the focus on Bill, she also told stories about herself and donated thousands of her own personal papers to the Marshall, separate from her husband’s collection. Elizebeth’s papers included documents she had preserved from the smuggling era of the 1920s and ’30s, personal letters, her unfinished book manuscripts, diaries, and a lot more, but she had not indexed and annotated the collection like she did with William’s. The archivists helped organize Elizebeth’s files into twenty-two archival boxes, reverently stored behind the metal doors of the vault on the first floor.

In years that followed, researchers journeyed to the Marshall Library and used the Friedman files to write books that wouldn’t have been possible before. The author James Bamford relied partly on William’s collection to piece together his 1981 book, The Puzzle Palace, the first popular history of the NSA, whose publication the agency tried and failed to stop. The NSA sent representatives to the library twice, in 1979 and 1983, each time removing an unknown number of William’s items, but the Friedmans had done such a careful job of indexing that a sharp-eyed professor at Virginia Military Institute, Rose Mary Sheldon, noticed that about 200 of the 3,002 index cards were missing. Sheldon submitted a series of Freedom of Information Act requests that eventually prodded the NSA to release 7,000 additional Friedman documents. In the last two decades the agency has gotten more comfortable telling its history—today it holds public cryptologic history conferences and operates a museum—but it took a while, and in the meantime, the Friedmans had created this alternate archive, beyond U.S. government control, where anyone could learn about U.S. codebreaking.

Even so, the attention of researchers fell lopsidedly on one Friedman and not the other. Elizebeth’s papers at the library, unindexed and therefore mysterious, largely gathered dust while people explored William’s. The world forgot about her and remembered him, which is what she had expected anyway. In 1975 the NSA informed Elizebeth that it planned to name the main auditorium at Fort Meade in William’s honor and asked her to inspect and approve a bronze bust of his head. She attended the dedication ceremony. The NSA men’s chorus sang “The Testament of Freedom.” The following year a biography of William was published, The Man Who Broke Purple, which Elizebeth felt was a competent account of her husband’s professional life but did not capture “the man I knew and loved.”

She struggled in her final years as her savings dried up and her arteries hardened. She missed Bill so much. In her letters she sounded like a battle-hardened version of the girl who set Riverbank aflame, quick as ever but no longer joyful. “There is just one thing in this world I would now advise all unborn babies,” Elizebeth typed one morning in a long letter addressed to no one (“I just had to blow off some steam”). She continued, “Either be born Rich or BE BORN POOR. It is we in between who PAY-PAY-Pay-y-y-y.” She disliked the direction her field was taking, its increasing reliance on computers. She gave an interview to a Houston Chronicle reporter who found her “lounging in a turquoise silk robe from China, a gift from her husband in 1928.” She told him computers are a curse. “The problem with machines is that nobody ever gets the thrill of seeing a message come out.” She let her children know she wanted her body to be cremated when she died, with no funeral services. “In a few years there will be no place left on earth to bury any one, and before too long, I think, all cemeteries will have to be disposed of,” she wrote. “Why add one jot or tittle to the mess already in existence?”

Elizebeth was eighty-eight when her arteries failed. She died on October 31, 1980, in a nursing home in Plainfield, New Jersey, four days before Americans elected Ronald Reagan to his first term as president.

The public response to her death was more muted than it had been for William’s eleven years earlier. The Washington Post and New York Times printed respectful obituaries of Elizebeth. None of the obituarists mentioned her feats of codebreaking in World War II; almost certainly none of the writers were aware.

At Arlington National Cemetery her ashes were scattered atop William’s grave and her name carved beneath his:

BELOVED WIFE

ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN

1892 • • • 1980

For years, nothing much happened.

It took a while for people to rediscover Elizebeth. Bit by bit, people went looking. Mostly women. They suspected there was more to her story than had been told, and they were right. A historian at the Department of Justice, Barbara Osteika, located records of Elizebeth’s old smuggling cases and came to see Elizebeth as a “beacon of hope” for women in federal law enforcement, a trailblazer. An FBI cryptanalyst, Jeanne Anderson, who solves the handwritten code and cipher notes of suspected criminals, found transcripts of Elizebeth’s trials from the 1930s and studied them for guidance on speaking to juries. And although Elizebeth had never worked there, she also won fans at the NSA, where female cryptanalysts rose to distinction after the war, including Juanita Morris Moody, who briefed U.S. leaders during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Ann Caracristi, who became the agency’s number-two official.

In the 1990s the NSA renamed its auditorium. The William F. Friedman Memorial Auditorium is now the William F. Friedman and Elizebeth S. Friedman Memorial Auditorium. As of 2014 there is a second auditorium in the Washington area bearing her name, at a Justice Department building, thanks to a campaign launched by Barbara Osteika. Above the doors it reads, ELIZEBETH SMITH FRIEDMAN, PIONEER OF INTELLIGENCE-LED POLICING.

These things happened for two reasons: because women went looking for Elizebeth’s ghost, and because her ghost was making noise in the archives. She was there inside the Marshall Library, rattling the doors of the vault, and she was in the “government tombs,” the National Archives, where her records from the Invisible War were finally declassified. The ghost also cried out from unexpected places. Three of the index cards in William’s collection contain brief, verifiably true comments about how J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI took credit for feats of spycatching actually performed by Elizebeth and the coast guard. These comments were obviously written by Elizebeth—William wasn’t in a position to know. Each card is a knife slipped between the ribs of Hoover, Elizebeth’s patient revenge.

She intended to use all of these archives to write her own story. She never got around to it. Maybe she lost hope. But the files are exactly where she left them, the fragments of an extraordinary life. The files have a weight to them, a texture. They can’t be erased any more than Elizebeth’s legacy can be erased, because her legacy is embedded in our lives today, in our smartphones and Web browsers, in the science that powers secure-messaging apps used by billions, in the clandestine procedures of corporations and intelligence agencies and in the mundane software loaded onto the iPhones in our pockets.

Secret communication is still a dance of codemakers and codebreakers, locks and lockpickers. The locks are different now, of course. With computation as an aid, everything has been massively sped up and mathematized beyond anything Elizebeth would have comfortably understood. But the game is still based in patterns. Someone designs a pattern that looks like mere clutter, and someone else tries to rearrange the clutter into a picture. Over and over again, gazing at what seemed random in the world, Elizebeth found a tiny spot of sense, and then she stood on that spot and invented a system to transform the rest of the landscape all the way out to the horizon, and this is still the process today. Codebreaking is work and patience and method and mind. And Elizebeth had more of these qualities than perhaps anyone else in her time.

She always remained a little sphinxy. Up to the end of her life she hesitated to blurt out all her secrets, to answer every question in movie detail, whether out of modesty, habit, fear of prosecution, or an appreciation for mystery.

“There are plenty of mysteries that you can leave dangling,” she told the NSA’s Virginia Valaki during their discussion in 1976. “Enough to allure a reader, I’m sure.”

“I’ve been trying to put together the pieces,” Valaki said. “We’ll never make the whole picture . . . at least we’ll get some of the perspective straightened out.”

Valaki was one of Elizebeth’s descendants, part of the next generation of women codebreakers who prospered after the war. She first joined the agency in 1954 as a linguist and now edited the NSA technical journal Cryptolog.

“Well, thanks again, Mrs. Friedman,” Valaki said.

“Well, don’t thank me,” Elizebeth said. “It’s been interesting.”

“Sometime I myself would love to do a profile on you,” Valaki added.

“Oh!” Elizebeth said.

“Girl cryptanalyst and all that. I would think it would be extremely interesting for people to read.”

“What happened the other day?” Elizebeth said, asking the question to herself. She said she had been out in the city, walking on Capitol Hill, when she realized that a couple of young women nearby had seen her and were talking about her. Elizebeth recognized one of the women. They had crossed paths somewhere years earlier, in a professional capacity, and Elizebeth was tickled by the fact that these women considered her some kind of noteworthy figure. “Oh my!”

Valaki shut off the recorder. She and Elizebeth spoke for an unknown amount of time, possibly about mutual acquaintances at intelligence agencies. Then the recorder started again, and before too long, the conversation wound to a close.

They checked the time.

“You mean to say it’s only five minutes after one?” Elizebeth said.

“My heavens!” Valaki said.

It had been so long since Elizebeth had talked about her life smashing codes that a simple conversation felt like an opera.

“I’ll bet no two women ever said as many words in [so] short a time,” Elizebeth said.

The transcript notes that the women laughed.